


In The Moment

by Ilral



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Medical Examination, My First Work in This Fandom, Post-Chapter 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-27 10:37:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10012358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilral/pseuds/Ilral
Summary: Tuuri's outlook on life has been gloomy since her injury. Mikkel takes matters into his own hands, and by hands I mean medical tools, but also hands.





	

A staccato burst of typewriter clicks rang out through the cramped study of the cat-tank. Mikkel paused for a moment, mentally translating the next line off of the Danish document beside him, and typed out another sentence. He squinted at one of the smaller diagrams on the sheet-a flow chart of sorts, but the text was miniscule. He looked over to Tuuri, who was sliding already-transcribed originals into waxed envelopes

“Could you grab me that magnifying glass?” She nodded slightly, and reached up to grab the lens off of a shelf. Mikkel heard a sharp intake of breath, and looked over to her. She was holding her left arm slightly below shoulder height, eyes wide. Mikkel reached out to steady her--she was quivering. 

“That--that  _ really  _ hurt.” Mikkel nodded, and opened his mouth to release some sage advice. Tuuri cut him off. “I get that it should hurt, Mikkel. I’ve been achy there since… I guess I haven’t done much with my left arm since then.”

“It’s nothing to worry about, at least for now. Trying to perform surgery for a wound like yours in the field... You’d end up short an arm either way.” Mikkel rubbed his own shoulder, reminiscing. 

“But what if it  _ is _ something to worry about? What if the bite’s hurting because it’s about to grow teeth and start trying to bite your arms off?” She looked at the hastily-stitched patch on her parka nervously, and Mikkel sighed and laid a pen across the paper to mark his spot. He picked up the typewriter and heaved it up onto the shelf above the desk, leaving a clear space. 

“Wheel that chair over here, then. I’ve been getting rusty with internal medicine anyway.” He pulled out a linen wrap from a drawer under the desk and unrolled it on the veneer surface. Inside were several probes, a small scalpel, a cautery, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and an odd device with a pair of steel knobs connected to a plastic case. There were reddish stains on the probes and the scalpel. “Take off the parka and roll your sleeve up.”

Tuuri tossed the parka aside into a corner and rolled up the sleeve of her black undershirt, revealing the bite. There was no swelling or bleeding, just two arcs of thin reddish wounds, like parentheses. Between them, Mikkel supposed, could have been enough troll spit to kill the whole expedition. 

He ran his hand softly over the area, to check for inflammation or leakage. Tuuri shivered slightly--was it the chill of his fingers, or something else? He banished the thoughts from his mind for now.

“A clean wound, if nothing else. Wish the wounds we treated in Bornholm were half this neat.” He shuddered, remembering days and nights spent wrist-deep in some poor soldiers’ insides. Picking up a pair of probes, he held them above her shoulder. “Tell me when this hurts.” Prodding the probes in together, he moved them around, feeling the fibers of the muscle underneath. One probe pushed down a centimeter deeper, and Tuuri yelled.

Mikkel yanked the probe away and marked the spot with a dab of correction fluid from the tin behind him. “That’d explain why it hurts, then. Tear in the quadriceps muscle” Tuuri nodded, biting her lip. A tear left a wet trace down her cheek. Mikkel turned back to his tools and picked up the scalpel. He dripped a few drops of rubbing alcohol onto it and wiped it across the linen wrap. There was a faint pink mark left behind. “I need to take a blood sample.” He didn’t phrase it as a question.

Tuuri shied away as he brought the blade closer, eyes wide. The blade jabbed out in a flash of silver and left a cut a couple centimeters long. Blood seeped slowly from it, and he ran the flat of the blade across the wound, squeezing out a few drops that clung to the stained steel. Tuuri clenched her teeth and sucked in a breath as he turned around and picked up the plastic-cased device. A small black button on its side was pressed down, and a blue-white arc of electricity popped across the millimeters between the two shiny knobs.

The scalpel blade slid between the knobs and the arc popped again. Mikkel released the button and sniffed the burnt remains of the blood drops. A coppery smell filled his nostrils, but the distinctive open-sewer smell of burning gro ßling was thankfully missing. “Good news. You’ll survive the week.” 

Tuuri started. “How’d you figure that?” 

Mikkel opened the desk drawer again and pulled out a swatch of fabric. He dribbled some alcohol onto the swatch and dabbed Tuuri’s wound with it. “I can’t make a guarantee that you’re not infected, but if there’s virus in there it hasn’t hit the blood yet.” 

She sighed. “It’d be nice if there was a way to know for sure.” Mikkel nodded absentmindedly as he picked up the cautery, then paused.

“Would it?” His tone belied past experience, and his eyes darkened for a moment, filled with memory. “Tell me, what would you have done if I told you you were infected?” Tuuri had been staring at the cautery’s glowing wire nervously, but at that she looked up, surprised. There was a moment of silence, and Mikkel stared into her worry-filled eyes.

“I-I guess I would have…” Mikkel nodded silently, turning off the cautery and setting it aside.

“Taken the honorable route, yes. I’ve had more than a few patients ask for my service pistol in favor of my stitches.” The tip of Tuuri’s mouth rose slightly. “I phrased that poorly, I’ll admit. I never once gave it to them, though.”

“Why? Why let them suffer through that?” 

“It takes about seven days to progress from initial signs of infection to the comatose state. Do you know what a man can do in seven days?” Mikkel turned away and began rifling through his desk drawer again.

“A… A lot? Especially if--”

“If he knows he has nothing to fear.” Mikkel turned back to her, holding out a few photos. They depicted the battles on and around the Oresund bridge. In each one, the photographer had taken care to place certain figures in the center of the frame--men and women charging ahead armed with torches, knives, even their bare hands. They all wore red scarves around their waists. Mikkel tapped the soldier in one of the photos, who was holding a broken bottle and running at a troll. 

“The finest lot of soldiers I ever served with, by my reckoning. I took these photos to send to their families--saved a few copies for myself.” He handed the one he’d been looking at to her. Tuuri looked at it, confused. “Now, I don’t expect you to run at trolls or be that photogenic.” He coughed slightly, thinking that the second expectation was already more than met, then continued. “But I expect you to work. It’ll take your mind off of your injury.” 

Mikkel reached down into the desk and pulled out a small paper card. He used the still-hot cautery like a pen, scribbling a few lines onto it in Danish. “I prescribe no heavy work for a week along with a regimen of stretches and a few cc’s of existentialism.” He smiled slightly and handed Tuuri the card. 

“Thanks, I guess. Why’d you--” Mikkel shushed her, and put a hand on her right shoulder.

“Because I knew that without it you’d have helped Sigrun with whatever inane requests she came up with. And that’d interfere with your healing. Consider it a bribe for sitting here and listening to my prattle.” He chuckled at that, and began putting his tools away.

Tuuri turned around and began putting her parka back on. She folded up the ‘prescription’ and placed it into her breast pocket. Glancing back, she saw Mikkel putting the linen wrap into his desk and pulling the typewriter down. She blushed a little, and opened her mouth. No words could come out. 

Mikkel dropped the brush for the white-out on the floor. It left a series of white stripes along the floor as it rolled. He turned around to pick it up, and paused as he saw her face. “Yes?” 

There was a pregnant pause. Tuuri spoke slowly, carefully.

“Thank you. For everything.” She looked down at her feet.

Mikkel smiled. “It’s not considered polite to thank someone twice for the same thing.” It may not have been possible for Tuuri to stare downwards harder than she did in that moment. He placed the whiteout brush on the counter behind him--it could wait. He leaned down and she looked up--their faces were inches apart. “I didn’t get through medic school without picking up a little bedside manner. So tell me, what did you really want to say?”

Tuuri’s cheeks grew pink. “I-I wasn’t expecting you to… to  _ care  _ so much. You never act like that around Sigrun or Emil.” 

Mikkel nodded, rising up to a sitting position and cursing himself for being found out. “I suppose it’s a paternal instinct. I never had any kids--for lack of trying more than anything else. Not easy to build a family when you get, eh,  _ reassigned _ every few months.” Tuuri blushed deeper, and he waved his hand. “In the absence of a child, my instinct projected onto the youngest member of the crew.”

“Lalli?” Tuuri’s blush faded, replaced by a look of confusion.

Mikkel swore under his breath, both at his own poor argumentation and for forgetting to reread the crew dossiers. He tried to formulate a new cover, but his mind was blank. He figured confusion would serve him better than evasion, and gulped. “I’m a bad liar. Sorry. The truth is… I may have become more attached to my patient then my professors would have approved of.” 

Tuuri sat silent for a moment, confused. She started suddenly, and a broad smile spread across her face.  “You mean me, right?” she said hopefully.

Mikkel ran a hand over his face, sighing. “Yes.” His face grew sullen. “I almost wish I hadn’t.” Tuuri’s face suddenly fell, and he quickly backpedaled. “No offense, but it’s a bad idea for a medic to get close to one of his patients in the best of times, let alone in these, er,  _ unfortunate _ circumstances. It’s probably only fair that those professors never gave me a diploma.”

“Nobody’s ever told me that they loved me.” Mikkel looked confused. “I mean, obviously Onni told me about once every hour, and Lalli said so a few times too, for what it’s worth. But nobody like you.”

“Like me?”

“Nobody who was at risk of getting punched by Lalli.” Her laughter reminded Mikkel of a jackdaw’s call as it filled the room. She quieted down after a moment, almost lowering her voice to a whisper. “And nobody who I felt the same way about.” Mikkel’s eyes widened.

“Are you sure?”  She nodded shyly. “Maybe I can make an exception, then.” He held out a hand to her,which she grasped. Both of their hands were shaking. Mikkel pulled her up and leaned in questioningly. Tuuri understood, and leaned in as well. His corded arms wrapped around her, softer than Lalli or Onni had ever hugged her. She could feel his heartbeat, slow and steady compared to her own heart, which fluttered like the wings of a freed dove. 

They remained there, revealing a little in the warm feelings that were new to the both of them. Outside, the sun was falling in the sky. They heard the crunching of snow under boots outside. Reluctantly, Mikkel pulled away from Tuuri. She looked at him questioningly, and he looked back. For the moment, neither of them heard the knock at the door.

Sigrun looked in through the windscreen at them, and knocked on it, leaving a mark of bloodied snow where her fist struck. Lalli stood behind her, mouth slightly open. Tuuri didn’t think about how he would react when he heard the full story, or about the pain of the still-seeping slice in her shoulder. For now, at least, she was content.


End file.
